San Diego’s brash rookie mayor, famous (and getting more so by the frenzied news cycle) for his martially artful style, took his game up a notch last week when he rained rhetorical blows on SANDAG’s budgeting for public communications, a work product that can be condensed into two letters: PR.

Though he often shoots from his hair-trigger lip — and predictably has fired up the business community to unhorse (if not recall) him — Filner drew a high-five from the Everyman on the Street when he reared up and blistered SANDAG for failing to give its PR budget a good smell test.

Filner couldn’t believe that SANDAG, the 25-member regional planning agency, is putting aside $40 million over the next five years for outside PR work when it already has 10 scribes whose job is to inform the world about the projects coming ’round the mountain.

As Filner could have said, hundreds of weekly newspapers around this country don’t have 10 reporters and editors.

Hell, there are small dailies without newsroom staffs of 10.

And yet we’re to nod understandingly when SANDAG officials say the existing PR platoon may need to be shored up by dozens of firms that will be standing by, ever ready to jump into the breach and inform the public about transit and other projects that the residual force is just too busy to get their tired arms around.

Please.

If the Washington sequester works its way down to SANDAG, this $40 million contingency fund could be pared to, say, zero.

Sequester problem solved.

And if SANDAG experiences an exodus of exhausted wordsmiths who refuse to work in a sweat shop, I know a number of recently laid-off journalists, all of whom have labored honestly for years, who’d jump at the prospect of churning out factual copy and eye-catching graphics for decent pay and good benefits.

The weird thing about this self-inflicted PR black eye is this: SANDAG’s positive name ID, the sine qua non of PR, is far from universal.

Here you have a key agency with a $1.3 billion budget and you’d be lucky to find five people out of 10 who have a clue what its mission is.

Sandag? Uh, beach farming?

Why SANDAG hasn’t been nicknamed something that memorably reflects its identity is a mystery to me.

The full name — the San Diego Association of Governments — has been reduced to an acronym that all but the wonky yearn to forget as soon as possible.

Personally, I like to refer to SANDAG as “Roads & Rail R Us” or, for short, R&R R Us.

(By the way, I offer this snappy moniker free of charge. If SANDAG insisted on paying me thousands of dollars for “brand consulting,” I would refuse the windfall on behalf of taxpayers.)

It’s irony as rich as a padded expense account that the PR-heavy agency has been pulled up short for planning for more PR. What’s more, if Escondido Mayor Sam Abed gets his way, the controversy will generate more PR Muzak to soothe the San Diego mayor and the media’s savage breast.